January 29, 2015
A Smattering of SEO News – 1/29/15

As we look back on January 2015, we can safely say that it was one HECK of a month for SEO news. Algo-updates, mobile nonsense, and so much more; and it looks like this past week is no different. Let’s dive in!

Google News:

Googlebot Becomes Language And Locale-Aware – Google has announced a massive upgrade to its spider. They’ve now changed the way the spiders behave, allowing them to come from a multitude of US and non-US IP addresses (which are also used to help determine a site’s location) and support a multitude of languages. While Google still says they want different language versions of a website to have special URLs, this will definitely help websites that serve dynamic content based on the language or IP of their users.

Odd Little Update Occurred Earlier This Week – Did you see some odd fluctuations in your rankings or traffic earlier this week? Well, you weren’t alone! A big kerfuffle was raised on WebmasterWorld about the fluctuating SERPs, and the normal tools such as Mozcast show some fluctuations as well. Interestingly, according to Google’s John Mueller, it had nothing to do with Panda or Penguin. So…what was it? We’ll keep you posted if we can.

Google Mobile Descriptions Now Note If They’re Blocked – A little while back, Google added a feature wherein they would state in the search results whether a site was blocking Google via Robots.txt in their desktop results. Google has now adapted this for their mobile SERPs as well, so both users and site owners are clear that their site is blocking Google somehow (which is something Google has been warning against more and more of late).

“Trash Can” Coming To Analytics – While not specifically SEO related, it’s useful enough to be worthy of note. Analytics will soon have a trash can that – like its Mac and Windows brethren – will save data for a certain amount of time (in this case, 35 days) in case someone…oh, I don’t know, accidentally deletes an account or three. No, I’ve never done that myself, I’ve just heard tell…

Other News:

Report: Facebook Drives Around 25% Of All Referral Traffic – According to a new report from Shareaholic, Facebook’s share of social media traffic referrals saw a significant gain in the last four months of 2014, going from 22.36% in September to 24.63% in December (October and November both saw numbers over 25%). With referral traffic becoming a larger and larger portion of all web traffic, it doesn’t look like Facebook’s social dominance is going to end any time soon.

Yahoo Sees Tremendous Revenue Gains In 2014 – As part of Yahoo’s recently released earnings report, they announced that they generated $1.1 billion in revenue in 2014, an increase of 95% (95!) year-over-year. That’s…downright amazing. CEO Marissa Meyer credits much of their success to their newfound focus on mobile. Mobile properties alone generated $768 million in revenue for all of 2014. Meyer says mobile has “transformed Yahoo”, and she seems to be right.